Belated Bong-Metal Set Proves Pot’s Effect on Reaction Time

May 4, 2004

Hot from the wires comes news that High Times magazine has a Baghdad correspondent filing stories that locals are toking weed and getting stoned. That is, when not being forced to cop a different flavor of blow from car bombs, JDAMs, and machine-gun fire. It’s democracy!

Hamid’s buying schwag in the smoking cradle of civilization while maxing to heavy metal—probably High Volume: The Stoner Rock Collection, also issued by High Times. And that’s a fully baked idea, too, if there ever was one: a doper mag publishing an omnibus of stoner metal about four years after the peak of enthusiasm for the genre.

It’s a shame, because there was an age when there weren’t more people in stoner metal bands than there were fans of it. But that was a good long time ago, and too many on High Volume are due for the glue factory. None need rendering more than Corrosion of Conformity, a band that has taken decades of toil to master playing really boring metal slow and making denim look like it was dragged a mile on an oiled dirt road.

The CD kicks off with, no lie, a song called “Too Stoned” by—eyes roll—Gas Giant. Bad Wizard, Clutch, and Orange Goblin do OK, and High on Fire supply a cut for those who believe elephantine means pure excitement. The remaining no-names push amps to boiling, punctuated by cryptic exclamations from vigorously humorless singers.